SLOW search, yet FAST Quick Switcher for LARGE vault. Why?

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1

Greetings,

I have a vault with 30,000 notes (transferred from Evernote). I constantly reference these old notes AND I make edits to them as well.

Searching for my notes takes a LONG time! I figured searching within locally stored notes would be FASTER than other apps, but it’s not. Why is this? Will it always be this way? Or should I move my 30,000 notes to a separate app?

Why does Quick Switcher provide INSTANT search results (no loading time)?

Yet, the regular search takes a VERY long time?

Is it because Quick Switcher only searches for Titles of notes? and regular search looks within the note body?

Apps like Simplenote are INSTANT. It searches within the body and pulls the results up as soon as I type it. This is a necessity.

Also, Obsidian startup time is SUPER slow. And it has to start back up each time close background apps. I want it to STAY running constantly, like all other notes apps.

Does anyone else have a large vault like this? What’s your solution?

Perhaps I should use 2 note taking apps? One for storing the 30,000 notes? and Obsidian for something else?

I need a note taking app that provides INSTANT search results.

Should I move to Upnote, Nimbus Note, Simplenote, Amplenote?

I don’t like simplenote because I can’t organize the notes into folders.

2

Are you on mobile? Please give some more details, or post your “Show Debug Info”.

Also if you search the forum, you can find a few discussions on this. You might find a clue to help you. Like the community plugin that can debug startup time.

3

QuickSwitcher doesn’t do content.

A few months ago (say, 2 months), my 20k note vault took 4-5 secs on mobile (maybe 6-7) and my PC took longer on first try and faster on consecutive searches.
I felt okay with it, so I could uninstall a third party plugin that I had felt I needed.

Now things are slower for me too.
I even thought about deleting my cache but for now, I use the ripgrep feature of the Another Quick Switcher community plugin (Omnisearch I no longer use).

I’ve been using the free program long enough not to come here to complain and also to have experienced some strange behaviour.

Actually, on my iPad, last time I tried, the app Samurai Search was faster than my Obsidian, which (Samurai) – judging from the size – cannot use anything better than normal grep under the hood.

It’s like Obsidian can’t access the cache or some other plugin hijacks it. Would be nice to investigate but I have 60ish plugins installed. And even if I could narrow it down to 3-4, I would still need those plugins to run.

4

Quick Switcher only searches the index of note names and aliases. Search searches every word in every note, which is a bigger task.

Do you see the same problem after turning on Settings > Community Plugins > Restricted Mode and then restarting Obsidian? If not, a plugin may be to blame.

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5

The Divide and Conquer community plugin can help track down a problem plugin quickly — at which point you can consider whether acceptable workarounds might exist.

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6

Thanks, buddy.
Well, I am becoming experienced enough to know which could be the offending party in this case.
Better Command Palette was the first I looked at as something that could butt in and deactivating it indeed made my second, third, etc. searches roughly 10 sec for a 20k vault.
I was not particularly using that plugin anyway.

Cheers

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7

Today I found time to have a go at my pool of community plugins. I started out on Windows and copied what was working into a new .linux folder.

  • Basically two things necessitate different folders for WIndows and Linux installations: hotkeys and the Another Quick Switcher plugin (you need to specify the folder where you installed ripgrep, although actually you can access the Windows partition from Linux).

I tested at least 10 times startup and running regex searches straight after startup while having Omnisearch doing its thing loading/updating cache in the beginning. I enabled and disabled plugins while looking at Omnisearch and the time it takes to do its thing. I used this plugin to help with benchmarking, so to speak.

I deemed the following plugins to be likely to cause issues (freezing or some slowness) (at least for my iPad/ Windows/Linux installations – apologies to the devs for the bad rep):

  • Tag Folder;
  • Advanced Tables;
  • File Tree Alternative;
  • Quiet Outline.
    (I also experienced some lag with other plugins, but as I was hauling files around, Windows Defender kicked in so I had to take into consideration other factors as well.)

As I said, in the meantime, I reenabled Omnisearch which takes much less time now at startup and consecutive searches are lightning fast.

Using the Uri Commands, Advanced URI plugins and Commander macros in conjunction, I also made some on-demand shortcuts, which means some plugins are only enabled while used, then after a delay they are automatically disabled.

  • Thought about writing it up but you get the idea.

Now both my Windows and Linux installations feel snappier. I also uninstalled and disabled other plugins.

As a genenal rule, one can make fresh starts by going into About and Override config folder. Then quit Obsidian, throw your absolute must plugins in the new dot folder you specified and chances are you can have a faster vault, after your virus checker has done its thing.

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8

I was not happy with the speed of my search again. I wonder why it can become like this over time?

I went ahead and deleted my cache/database files and had Obsidian re-index my vault.

Steps:
1) Quit Obsidian.

2) Navigate to the following locations:

Windows:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\obsidian

Linux:
/home/<username>/.config/obsidian

Delete these folders:

Cache
Code Cache
DawnCache
GPUCache
IndexedDB
Storage

3) Restart Obsidian

Obsidian global vault search speed is back to normal.

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